Taco Night With Mr. Butler

So I had no intention of blogging about these, until I saw and tasted the end result. Its past midnight and I would rather write this than sleep. So first of all, I don't know exactly who invented Soy Butler Curls, but I imagine his name is Mr. Butler. Perhaps I am thinking of the show Mr. Belvedere from when I was a kid, and I am just combining the two. Nonetheless, chickens everywhere are clucking his praises. These soy curls aren't some scary faux meat with a list of scary ingredients. In terms of processing, they are the equivalent of tofu as far as I can tell. Ingredients are: Whole, textured soy beans. Thats it! They are packaged in a dehydrated state. Just soak them in water for about 10 minutes, then squeeze them super hard to get all the water out. What makes these soy curls superior to animal flesh is that they are like a sponge, absorbing all the yummy marinade. 

Speaking of marinade, thats the part I really want to share! See, it starts with my new favorite toy, the Omega 8003 juicer. This thing is amazing. I get a bone dry pulp and quality juice. 

 

So anyway, I had a bunch of veggies in my fridge that I wanted to use up. Why? Because I'm going to Farmer's Market on saturday and I like to have a clean slate when I go there. I'm like a kid in a candy store when it comes to Farmers Market. This is when I got the idea to use veggie juice as my marinade.
This was my step by step process:

• First I juiced two oranges in my regular citrus juicer, about 1 cups worth.
• Then I added 4 Tbs of lime. I actually make lime cubes in advance like I do lemons. 1 Tbs per cube. We have an awesome tree. 1 lime=2 Tbs. Now for the veggie part. 
• I had tomatoes, red onion scraps, anaheim chile peppers, and even a bunch of parsley from my garden that I didn't use all of from something else. The majority of this juice came from tomatoes and chile peppers. In the end I had about 3 cups worth. 
• I added this to the orange juice mixture, along with 1 Tbs salt, and 1 ts each garlic powder, cumin, and paprika. This is why I wasn't going to blog about it, because I just put a bunch of veggie scraps in the juicer. Who would've thought it would turn out to be so exquisite?
• I had a lot of marinade, so I used it in place of water to cook some Lundberg's black rice. I love black rice! I used 1 cup of black rice, 2 cups marinade, and put it in my rice cooker on the brown rice setting.
• I also had some corn, which I combined with the cooked rice. 
• Then I fried the soy curls to a crisp using a small amount of peanut oil in my large eco friendly non-stick skillet. 
• Next, I combined the soy curls with the black rice and corn. At this point, I knew I had a good thing going. Now all I had to do was fry my tortillas. I don't usually fry my tortillas, but it just felt right this time.
• This part is pretty easy to figure out. Just put a shallow amount of oil in a small non-stick skillet on medium heat. 
• When the oil is hot enough, drop in a tortilla, let it get golden brown, flip it over to brown the other side. I also used the big pan that I used to fry the soy curls, so I had two pans going.

Jason kept saying how good these were. He especially loved the juice that was seeping out with each bite. These were so awesome! And I love that I didn't plan on making something this good. Thank you Mr. Butler!